Country Overview

Introduction

Austria covers a total area of 32,368 square miles and shares borders with the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Liechtenstein, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland. In the west and south it is mountainous, and the eastern and northern margins are mostly flat.

With roughly 6 million Roman Catholics, Austria is a Catholic stronghold in the center of Europe. Reduced from a powerful (Austro-Hungarian) empire before World War I to a small republic by the end of World War II, the permanently neutral country has a religious landscape that has developed alongside those of other European countries in the postwar period. While the Catholic Church continues to play a formidable role in political and social affairs, the general trend of secularization, prominent even among Catholics, has eroded the church's influence in...